How to Get Unstuck & Finish What Matters | Charlie Gilkey | Good Life Project

Do what matters most and I'm gonna focus on the doing if you know that you've been doing a lot of talking and a lot of

ideating but you have him doing a lot of making or doing or leading or whatever your thing is

Just understand that that gap between the good life you want to live and where you are is

Probably bridged by certain types of doing that you have to start doing

So if you ever notice how hard it's become to focus these days to know what really matters to get out of the

Stuck zone start building momentum and actually finish the stuff that is truly important to you

It was already pretty hard in before times and now we might as well just go ahead and 10x that challenge and if you're feeling this

You're not alone. This struggle is real

But what if there was a way to quickly figure out what matters to focus on that to dislodge that wheel spinning and

Nershan get on stuck and go from idea to done to become a bit of a productivity Jedi

Well, that is what we are talking about in today's powerful best of conversation with one of my closest advisors and regular

collaborator

multi award-winning author of the book start finishing and founder of productive flourishing Charlie gilky

And we dive into Charlie's specific ideas around why so much of our effort to be productive fails and

How to rewire our brains and our schedules and our actions to more easily see beyond all of the distractions and focus in on the stuff that we've

Started choose what really matters what's worth finishing and then take immediate action to make it happen and along the way

We also explore how Charlie's really unique background as a philosopher military officer

Productivity strategist and consultant to creative professionals founders and fast growth entrepreneurial teams has shaped his powerful lens on going from

Idea to done so excited to share this best of conversation with you on Jonathan Fields and this his good life project

You

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It's always kind of interesting for me when I sit down in the studio with somebody who

Is not only a friend, but I actually know really really well and who who who we have actually

been co-conspirators and business and life and all such a different things and

As we sit here today you it is the eve of you launching a fantastic new book called start finishing and we're getting diving to that a whole bunch

but

I want to take a step back in time because what I've learned over the years to is that when I catch sit down with an old friend

There are also

gaps

Because as happens with friends you kind of just hit the ground rolling with whatever topics you're interested in in your current life

And very often you don't actually know a ton about what got them to that place in life

So we're gonna fill in a little bit of those gaps. So

When we first met it was what 10 years ago. It's not 10 years ago. Yeah, it's right 2009 South by Southwest

I went to see you at see give your book talk of career renegade at the time right what we doing in Austin Texas for like what was your intention at South by Southwest 10 years ago?

You know in 2009 South by Southwest was just

One of those mechas for creatives at the time. We didn't have a lot of other conferences and so this was

Deep enough into my work at productive flourishing that I just wanted to meet a lot of people and I just knew that there are these people that I've been reading and looking up to

There's like this is my chance to say hi and how much they've

Inspired me and so that was my main intention for that South by Southwest is just to meet all these people and put a

Physical face to a digital avatar

And so the primary connection there or the primary point was connection at that point. Yeah

I remember

Meeting you tell me the session matches with your recollection. We were at somebody's house in South Austin

I have no idea how how I got there whose house it was what we were actually doing there

But I remember certainly bumping into you and I was like

This guy's brain works in a way that my brain absolutely does not work and I need to understand this and go deeper and find out like what's behind all of this

What I learned really quickly is that

you're this

kind of weird blend of

philosopher king and

Unshakeable calm and also

operating and execution

Brilliant you think in systems and processes and frameworks and the way that my brain doesn't operate

And I know that not long before the time that I met you you actually spent a chunk of time in the military

I'm curious does

Do these parts of you start to really?

Become super developed

There or were they showing up earlier in your life too?

I

Think they were showing up earlier in my life and they were just cultivated to a way in the military experience and so

Prior to joining the military. I was in Boy Scouts

I'm an Eagle Scout and I always was in this place of

Never having the resources that I needed to do what I wanted to do and always having to figure out like okay

I want to go there

But I don't have what I need to get there

So how do I leverage or get in the right room or figure that out and so there's always been that way of working backwards in that way that just was really

Really amplified as an

Armored logistics officer because that's the point like you've got to get stuff here. You got to get stuff there and you have

limited limited resources to do that and

You know that part of my life especially being deployed for

Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was the best and worst time of my life. How so it was the best time because

It really required

Being your full self and ways and stretching and growth in ways that are unimaginable for most people

You know not just the combat aspect of things but the being away from family being in a new environment

Being 24 and being responsible for 46 people and

20 vehicles and then later on being the Battalion Plans officer which is the guy that writes all the plans and

Make sure everybody is getting where they need to go and again, that's an incredible responsibility at that age and

There was it was unrelenting in the sense of every day

It was just a growth opportunity every day and you didn't have chance to you didn't have a chance to naval gaze or figure it out

In that sort of meta way you just had to do it and so it was the best time because of that and some of the friendships that I formed and doing all of that

And it's the worst time because it pulled me out of my life before that I was pursuing my

PhD in philosophy. I was a graduate student that was a route. I was going and

So it introduced this major break in my life and

Again being away from my family for a year all the things that you know come with being a deployed soldier

So it was really terrible and really great at the same time and I just came back a changed person and

Changed in a way such that those frameworks

That way of thinking about the world the system in the systemic way of thinking about the world

doesn't leave you

And so like you know, I'll walk into a store and I'll start thinking just how is this operating and what could it go better and

What if they move this desk six feet to the left?

What would that open up and just small things and big things and I can't turn that off?

Yeah, how much of it do you think I mean because so it's interesting like when it when when I've talked to people who are all about systems process

Efficiency logistics in the past and again my brain doesn't work that way so I'm fascinated by people whose brains do work that way

usually that's been developed in the arena of

Money, you know, so the end game is how do we optimize efficiency?

How do we get more stuff done more effectively?

Because at the end of the day we're trying to grow a company or business and enterprise and organization

Non-profit whatever it is

But you you develop those chops, you know the arena for you the cauldron was life and death

very different stakes

very different stakes and

There's a degree of

Intensity that comes with that because if you make a mistake people

Might not go home. Well, they might not go home alive and so you take it seriously in a different way and there's that sense of

continuous improvement in

the military

context is not again maximizing profit

It's maximizing the efficiency of your troops to accomplish the mission but more important than that bringing everybody home

Because no one wants the right that letter to families and

No one wants to be that person that made a mistake and that mistake cost them and there are so many things that happen

In combat and a military that are beyond your control

And so yeah, it definitely took that in and so even now all the stakes are not nearly as high

There's still that drive to

Smooth things out to make things more streamlined

And to really do the best with what we've got

The way I see it now is whether it's my company or some of the companies that I'm consulting with these are people's lives

You know, we show we spend so much of our life at work and when you look at the amount of waste that happens at work

And more important than that when you look at the amount of heartbreak that happens at work because

people are not utilized well

because

Leadership is not focusing them on what matters most people are not being appreciated for what they do it just breaks my heart

To see how much heartbreak happens at work and it breaks my heart to see how many people spend decades of their life

Doing something because of the story they've told themselves about how they need to be in this world and then looking back and saying is that it

All this time I put in and

And I still am not fundamentally happy. I still have not done the things

That I know I could have been doing and

While you may have you know zeros in your bank account or not. There's that sense of meaning if fulfillment

That is lacking and I think that's really heartbreaking

We have this one short life that we know of and life is really fickle, you know, that's the other thing that you learn from being

In the military and being deployed is that

At quarter of a second or a quarter of an inch

Can make the difference between

Someone going home and someone not between you going home healthy between you going home not being able to walk

and

And so and it's sometimes really

It's just a matter of luck

Right, and so we don't recognize how lucky we are every day

To be able to do the things that we do sometimes it's just moving and walking right that we take for granted

And so to spend decades

Of your life of this opportunity that you have in front of you

Not doing the things that fire you up and not making your unique contribution is really heartbreaking

Yeah, it means interesting to to

To have the experience that you had where you had so much on your shoulders in your early in mid-20s and

Awaken and then come home and awaken to the fact that okay, you saw this

When you were deployed and now you come home and you sort of see a

Similar pattern but in a different context a much broader context that for most people will last the vast majority of their waking years

You know was was that the reason I mean it's one of my curiosities that you know has been you were you're pursuing your PhD in philosophy before you go

You end up being deployed

You developed this fierce expertise in operational capability when you're actually in the military and then when you come back home

Instead of immediately diving back into the academic path which I know

Like you have a fierce desire to learn like you're someone who loves to devour knowledge and

And you and you did that to a certain extent

But the next move for you was to actually turn around and effectively

Start a company to be of service to other people

It is this all partly what what was behind you launching this endeavor which I could see back then was called productive flourishing

So yeah, it's really interesting because I came back in two weeks after being redeployed I was back in class

Back on my life right back doing my thing. I had figured all that out

I said everything up so that I was just going to slide back in not missing a step

Getting back to it and

I'm glad I did that at the same time that there's a reason why people need space from things like this right

Because about a year later I

realized that

Though I could excel as a philosopher it wasn't the way that I wanted to spin the rest of my life in

In the academic echo chamber talking to each other about all sorts of abstract things because I was like we are the people

That should be in the world solving problems like there are real things going on right now and it felt like such a waste of

Potential it felt like such a waste of people's lives and I'm not trying to you know

I dismiss

Academic philosophy or anything like that. I just knew for me

That there was more to life than that and being in those classrooms and

What I was studying a lot of was ethics

social political philosophy and especially

Economic development

Because what I

Understood and saw when I was overseas was yes, we're in the middle of this

War of ideology quote unquote

But at the same time we're in the middle of this vast

Contrast between the lives of people in the Middle East and their economic livelihood and the lives of people in the first world

and if we didn't address that gap

We're always going to be in the situation. We're always going to be in the situation

So I started studying a lot of that

And I started applying it to my life as like if I'm really about thriving if I'm really about

Helping people live the most of this one like we have where can I do that?

What's going to be the best place for me to do that and

The next best available option for me was to start productive flourishing start teaching people that and I kind of came to that after I started

productive flourishing because what I

My main pain when I started productive flourishing was I was this

creative idea bomber and

Had a bunch of ideas and a bunch of knowledge and a bunch of stuff that had to get out of me and I found a

really frustrating contrast between my ability as a

Logistics officer to move battalions of equipment and the do joint force military logistics coordination and

At the same time struggle with getting a 5,000 word essay done

What's that about right how can I do this and not do that and what can I apply from this world?

I've getting stuff done at this really excellent level and I don't have to say this

But the other thing and I've recently learned about myself recognized is that I

Served with the 101st Airborne division, right?

That was the parent unit that I was attached to and that is one of the armies like elite forces

So it's not just that I learned logistics in a military

Deployed context I learned it under the 100 first and

Excellence was just the way everything was done

everything was done and

I would say that was my first real

Professional experiences in the adult again. I was 24 and in my brain that was just the standard, right?

And so when I got out and didn't notice that standard I was like, huh?

What's what's this gap here?

But rolling it back a little bit I

started

Productive flourishing because I had this problem and I was reading all of the literature and I was trying to

Synthesize it and translate it and I was like well if I'm already doing that, you know fundamentally

I'm a teacher and trainer, right?

And I was like I'm already doing this for myself

Why don't I share it with the rest of the world because blogs were a thing then in a different way than they are now

And so that started and it started with very terrible names and very terrible niches because my first attempt was

teaching academics how to get stuff done and live a bigger a bigger bolder life and

And what caught on was a lot of the creatives I'm entrepreneurs found my work and loved it

And I was like this is really interesting. I didn't anticipate this

And so I started writing more for creatives and more for entrepreneurs

But it came to this point where I was like, you know, there's just fork in the road that I have in these careers that I have because I was

Simultaneously that still in the army still, you know, like a three-quarter time position with the army

I was still pursuing my PhD and now I had a business on my hands

And I reached that point that Seth Godin calls the dip

Where I realized I was not going to be excellent in all three of those

I was going to be mediocre at best and be struggling and juggling and

I didn't want that for myself and so it was really picking which of these

most

Advances the unique contribution that I have and allows me to live the fullest life possible and it was with productive flourishing and

so

It wasn't you know a lot of people start their businesses because

The either hater jobs or they're in a sole crush and managerial environment

It wasn't that for me as much as it was what's the best way for me to do what I'm out to do and that continues to evolve

And there may be some point in which there's another, you know, I get back in academia or whatever

But it's always that sort of evolving question for me. It's what's the best way to do this thing that I'm here to do

Yeah, is that a regular property like do you wake up once a week or once a day and sort of ask some variation of that question?

It tends to come for me in seasons actually and so summer is my

stupid faction and depression cycle

Hmm, so every summer I'm like don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't really want to do much of anything

I'm much less motivated

I'm just thinking how many other people listening to this go through something similar. Yeah, so it's a seasonal thing for me a lot a lot of times

And so every summer about I'm like hmm

As I start ramping up into fall

Am I ramping up in a way that is really pulling the best of what's possible for me now or am I playing last year script?

And what do I want this next year to look like so

And there was a very powerful prompt that I got during meditation a few years ago

So I'm about 40 now. I'll turn 40 in January and about the time I was 37. I was sitting there meditating one morning and

And this this prompt came to me was like what are you doing today to set up the season of your life that will be your 40s

Like that season of your life and I was like this is really what first off where is this coming from

but second

How do I want that season of my life to be different than this season of my life?

And I got some answers I didn't like

But so it comes for me every year, but it does come in sort of instantaneous like what are you doing now Charlie?

And are you stuck in last year's frame?

Are you keeping your eyes open to the possibilities that have been created or that you've created over the last year?

Yeah

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I mean two things jump out of me from that one is

That you

Wherever that prompt came from

I've seen that reflected in the way that you move into your decisions for years now and you have

There's this really interesting unique ability to think out ahead

To not be stuck in short-termism, but we're gonna circle back to that and a little further because you're

You're also not a fan of thinking too far ahead

So there's a really interesting tension there at that I want I want to circle back to but what what the other thing that jumped out of me is

So you mentioned summers or like the season first dupe of action and depression for you and

But so people couldn't see your face when you're talking about that

But you weren't bummed about it. You were kind of smiling almost like matter fat

Like well, this was almost it was kind of interesting slash

You know like good for me to recognize and acknowledges and just know this is just the way I am and I don't

Every every summer. It's not like this is a thing I have to battle

You know if I accept that this is kind of a thing that I just noticed in the pattern of my life

Then it allows you to sort of make peace with it and then build around it to a certain extent

Absolutely and thanks for seeing that because

If we were talking a decade ago, I may have been much I may have felt much different about my summer cycle

Because you're not supposed to feel that way and you're supposed to blah blah blah and all those things that we make ourselves but

One of the traps we fall into is that we think of ourselves like robots and we don't necessarily

Cognize that a lot and make that a conscious thought but we think that we should have a constant

Or a sort of regular amount of output a regular amount of the way that we feel and which is not that we're organic beings that respond to

Temperature and environment and seasons and things like that and so

being at peace with the

Fact that I'm a creature of this planet

And I'm sensitive to the seasons has given me a lot of peace and compassion for myself

But it's also from a strategic perspective. I know where to put projects and we're not to put projects, right?

And so during the summer is where I can't

Usually juggle 17 different projects, right? I do better having one project that I can work on

Two to four hours a day and when I'm done

I'm done and be at peace with that as opposed to my winter cycle, which is I call my supernova cycle where I can do a lot of things

I can work long hours and it's just sort of a natural natural thing for me

And so that's where I put that type of work usually right this year's different because of the book launch coming up

And so I've had to I've had more head trash

around

What I'm supposed to be doing right now and where my energy is and

Most days the more sane part of myself wins says you know what like no matter

What all you think you're going to do or you think you're supposed to do

You're only going to do X amount so that X plus Y the plus Y does it's just a tool to beat yourself up with you're not going to do it

so

How are you going to adjust your plans to do X and

How are you going to make peace with the fact that X is what you got?

and in many ways it's been a

great relearning experience

because it's a

Decade after it's like where I started I wasn't able to do everything that I wanted to do

How am I going to do it except for my approach and this season of my life is different than that season of my life

Because in that season of my life it was do more and do better

And this it's except where you are and leverage what you can do to the best way possible and learn to let the rest go

that do you feel like

Your sort of annual cycling is gives you work with so many people now like founder is creative professionals

larger organizations

So you have an interesting data set and interesting lens do you feel like this

Cycling that you feel on on the sort of like annualized basis is

Unusual unique to you. Or do you think pretty much everybody goes through it?

But we just don't identify it. I think pretty much everybody goes through it and

And where your energy may lie may be unique to you

But I think everyone has these eps and flows and organizations have eps and flows and

That's where

Inattentive leaders and managers get stuck and not stuck

They create a lot of problems for themselves and their teams because they're not recognizing that wait a second

my team's natural energetic state is here

I want them to be twice that so how do I crack the whip? How do I?

Motivate them how do I quote unquote empower them to get to where I want them to be as opposed to

How do I shift my expectations and my priorities to be clear on what they can do in this amount of time?

So I think everybody has it I think most of the time we don't slow down enough

To really get that like we you know slow down a little bit and it's like well, I just need to drink more caffeine

I just needed I need to alter who I am through other practices as opposed to saying where am I?

And what matters now? Yeah, it's so enchanted

You say my my sense has been I've experienced some some pretty major burnout over the last few years at different moments and and I it has

Take me way longer to own that then it should have because I know I would like to think of myself as somebody who sort of could perform

At an extreme level for an extended period of time and I've and it's brought me to my knees, you know

and and I had to own the fact that no I I actually cycle as well and what's what's been interesting for me

to note also is that

My you know nobody performs at the peak of their game on a sustained basis doesn't happen in athletics

It doesn't happen in music. It doesn't happen in business. It doesn't happen in relationships in life

And it's just like we were wired to sort of go through this you know like sine wave and I think one of the big learnings

partly from you has been that you know

So you describe it as when you hit winter it's your supernova window where you're just

Fearsely productive and creative and generative but if during your sort of like your downtime your slower time you force yourself

To to be as close to that supernova

Mode as you can be then when you actually hit that natural window

You then you don't have the juice left to actually perform at the level

You know you're capable of and it becomes even more frustrating. It's like this

compound effect that that really creates a negative spiral and

It absolutely does and I think the more you hone your cycles like that like I realized at this point that during that period where I'm on supernova

I am going to create enough work and problems and

Opportunities in that period that me and my team can work on for the rest of the year

Right like I don't have to create at that level for the rest of the year for

To do it and in fact if I did I would burn not only myself out but my team out

Right because there would just be such an influx of

New projects and new energy and new opportunities and new things

We know I my team has a codex of all the sort of hashtags and a short-hand language that we use and one is brace for impact

Right and there's when I've been on a trip or when I've been hanging out with friends and I show up Monday morning

And I'll just preface it with brace for impact right because I just know what my team is going to get on that day

I think I'm gonna need to start you

Yeah, and so

But you can't expect your team to do that at that level at all times or else you end up in that scaling trap

That's so many businesses get into

To where their team is constantly out of breath and

constantly just

Trying to do their best work from the bottom of the emotional and cognitive barrel because they've been worn out for so long and so

I look at it from a long game because if you choose your best work you choose that thing that you most want to do

You want to do that for the long for the long haul right you're talking about many decades

How do you do that over that amount of time?

Sustainably and how do you do it so that you don't go through these burnout cycles to where eventually

You throw out the baby with the bath water. You're just like I'm so burnt out. I can't do this. This is not for me

Well, it's not that it's not for you. It's the way that you're doing it is not for you

Yeah, I think that's that's so important because I think

For me the burnout didn't come because I was doing a

Whole bunch of stuff. I didn't want to be doing. I just wasn't doing it the way that was healthy or intelligent

Yeah, I actually loved a lot of what I was doing. It just I had to rewire the the way that I that I approached it

So as we sit here in the studio today you've been

I guess about a decade into productive flourishing right developing a

Tremendous body work frameworks process systems working with so many different people and you have a book out called start finishing so my curiosity with this is

Why does you feel the need to write this there?

There's no lack of books on the market about you know like getting stuff done about productivity

It's a big category and I also know about you that you don't do things just because you can like there's there's got to be a reason like what what did you see was missing that made you say

This is something I need to do because writing a book takes a lot of time and energy and takes you away from a lot of other things

So what in your mind knowing the way your brain works justifies you saying this has to happen

So part of it is strategically there's a

Book shaped hole in my business of this book because if you go to productive flourishing right now

Before the book is out you can't get the

cohesive journey and the cohesive material and coherent material on all the stuff that have been creating for the last decade

And so it ended up being this sort of gap in that people would want to really start doing more of their best work and

And it's hours of clicking around productive flourishing trying to figure out what it is as opposed to a systemic or a systematic approach to it

So that's one but more importantly than that

I think it's more of what's the heart of my work that makes me continue to write about productivity and it's really interesting because

Jonathan, you know, there's around 2014 I wrote a post called foundations are meant to be built on not flown over and

And what I found with so many of my

Entrepreneurs and executives and things like that we love to talk about the big ideas

We love to talk about the big strategy. We love to talk about all that stuff

Except for when you look at where the real constraint in their business was or where the real constraint in their

Opportunities that was was the fact that they couldn't execute on the ideas they already had right and we just wanted to fly over sort of this

scheduling and time management and project management and you know aligns building

We want to sort of fly over all of that and just talk about the big ideas, but those big ideas weren't happening

and so it came from the sense of frustration in a lot of ways with some of my set of some of my set of clients and peers

It's like no, no, no, no, no, we're not skipping over this piece because it will trip you up at some point

So that was sort of facing that set of people, but when I looked down the Scandi the productivity literature and

Even the personal development literature. I think there wasn't

the hybrid I wanted to see that took the real reasons why we do and don't do things and

Made it with the real ways we can get stuff done. There is always this divorce between

deeper motivation and

deeper systems and deeper processes for getting stuff done and so

We ended up in this sort of bipolar literature and bipolar place where you end up with really good

Montras for how to get stuff done, but doesn't actually help you once you start getting into the thrashing of the project or

One doesn't help you once you start it or you have a bunch of solutions that don't solve the real reasons you don't get stuff done

And so for me I needed to create it for that reason so that I can say like okay this book

does both at least to the best of my ability, right and

Looking at some of the other book ideas and other things that I want to write about

It's going to come back to getting stuff done because I'm neo-Ristotelian in the sense of we become by doing

Right so no matter what you want to do in the world or what you want to be in the world

There's some doing that you have to do to become that and

Whether it's being a great parent or whether it's being a great member of your community whether it's being a great pill of your church

It doesn't matter what that is all that being

Has some doing attached to it and enough of us. I think are over committed

To the being side of things and we try to be all of the things and we don't fully understand

How much doing we've also committed ourselves to doing until we look around and there's just a

Field of drop balls and broken promises and regrets and so

Interestingly one of what I find it interesting is that one of the pillars of my sort of principles of productivity is actually self-compassion and

I wanted to write the book

For multiple reasons, but one of them is so that

people can see what's going on in their world and

Understand that they're not uniquely defective that they're not

Constitutionally wired to never be able to get their shit together that are not faded to struggle

They're just making more promises

With their mouth that their hands can't cash

Right, they're promising themselves and they set up expectations for themselves that then there's no way possible for them

To actually live up to everything that they've said they're going to do and be

So when we pull down and say you know what there are fewer things

That we're going to focus on and commit to but we're going to do those well and we're going to finish them

Then we start to see the sense of satisfaction

Then we start to see that sense of happiness and then we start to thrive in our careers

Because we become those creatives

That you can trust when they say they're going to do something they're going to do it

When they set out to achieve a certain goal. They're going to do it and there's a rare breed of creatives

You know, we have a bad sort of rap of being all talk or being a lot of talk and not so much follow through but it turns out

Time and time again. I've seen this with people that I've interviewed on my podcast all the research that it and all my clients like the name of the game is follow through

Right and you increase your ability to finish the things that matter most

You know you knock out those

three projects of the year that really really matter and you let the rest go

That hasn't like this compound interest effect on your career that you just don't get when you're half finishing 17 things

Yeah completely agree and I feel like there's also

When you when you shift those gears, you know, and you actually you

Learn all the steps in the process and and the way to actually

Focusing on the smaller number of things and actually go from idea to

Completing it, you know like when you start finishing and you do that repeatedly

It's I feel like

Once you do that you go through that cycle a handful of times

It's almost like your identity begins to shift as well

So you you you start to identify not as a person with a lot of great ideas

Who rarely ever gets them done?

But you start to identify as the person who's accomplishing who is like who is who is doing the big things and you identify as somebody who is actually completing and putting

Good things out into the world and and that shift in identity creates this sort of like spiraling effect have you seen that also?

Absolutely, absolutely because at a certain point you develop this theory of yourself and

When you're not finishing a lot of times the theory of yourself is that you're not a finisher that you know

You can't get it done or that you know

You over commit you you have all this head trash about who you are and then that's what you project out in the world

And that's what you see you can create and you develop a confirmation bias about that once you do start finishing

I think what you realize is the word can't for most for all intents and purposes doesn't exist in your

In your psychology or in your language

It's you're choosing to do certain things over choosing to do others thing because you've done many great things already

and that shift from

Can I do it or that sounds like a good idea to like no?

I can do a lot of things, but what matters most now?

Yeah, it's such an identity shift and I've seen it in the way people's people carry themselves from posture

I've seen people I've seen it in the way that people

mysteriously start losing weight

Right, I've seen it in the way where all of a sudden money starts flowing their way

There's all these outer changes that happen from that inner identity shift

Because I think you know, I call it creative constipation and then

Creative constipation is just it's kind of what it sounds like you take into all of these ideas you take in all of this

Inspiration you watch all the TED talks you read all the books you listen to all the podcast and at a certain point you get full

But you're not pushing it through you're not doing anything with it and you become toxic and

You become to that point to where like there's this resentment of a new idea or a new thing coming in because you know that you're not going to be able to do it because you got everything else going on and

as humans we do one of two things we either create or we destroy and

There's a certain point when you're in creative constipation and you're not

Shipping what matters most to you that you'll start destroying the things around you

You'll start destroying the relationships and through your resentment of frustration and you being the martyr and you finding ways to

Insert yourself into other people's lives and projects

You'll destroy your resources you'll go on shopping benches or you'll go you'll eat a bunch or you'll do whatever thing that you have and or

You'll start destroying yourself

Through the ways that you stories that you tell yourself

Through all the ways you find evidence about why you can't do something and why you're uniquely defective and why failures of the past

Meaning that you're gonna have a failure tomorrow

so I think we don't fully recognize the cost of

Of not doing our best work in that way like we think it's something we can get to but I will want to put it more on just

an essential

Way to find your happiness both long-term but also in that presence because there's that shift

When this week you made a dent in your best work this week you got something done versus being the to-do list ninja

You know where you put 82 things on your list you crank them out at the end of the week you look back and you're like

But really like I didn't do the thing. I'm no closer to doing the thing and everybody has a thing

That's the other thing that I noticed like I'm gonna talk about best work and it's got a few unique factors to it

But it's that work that your soul most yearns to do

And everybody's got a project they put in a

Physical drawer and a mental drawer and a virtual drawer that they're going to get to at some point when

You know someday when the time is right or when their boss is less of a butthole or when their kids are in college or whatever

We've always punted that to someday some some later day everybody has that

but there's that sense of

deep satisfaction

When you quit the bullshit when you quit the quote unquote researching

When you quit all the conversations about doing the work and you actually do the work and

And

It's surprising how simple it is to actually do it and yet we don't

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Yeah, it's interesting too because

That you you hear a lot in sort of self-help pop psychology

This line you can do anything

Maybe for heartbeat when you're listening to you speak like oh, that's what he's saying I can do anything

But in fact, it's like you're saying the exact opposite

Yeah, um displacement is a real thing and displacement is just the idea that choosing to do one thing

Means that there's a near infinity of things you've chosen not to do right and so we too often conflate you can do it anything

With you can do everything

Right and while I might say you can do anything

I would also say what are you gonna choose not to do so that you can do that thing?

What are you really gonna commit in your life to be able to do that thing?

There's some things that you know, I'm five foot ten. I'm never gonna be a world champion basketball player

Right, it's just not possible especially given that I'm 40 and I don't like basketball

There's a lot going against me with that right?

So I'm not gonna say I can be you know LeBron James

Can't do that so within the realm of

creative space though

there's a lot

Of room to maneuver and grow and become whatever you want to be and

It's gonna come at a cost of all the things you have to choose not to do and choose to do to get there and so

I talk a lot about displacement in the sense of I want people to really understand

That we have this one precious life and I've been talking for a long time about what I call project world and

Project world is the idea that when we look at our lives

It's kind of carved up in the three to five year chunks of a project capital P project

both personally and professionally right and so I'll talk personally first

We go through these phases of relationships

We go through this phases of growth like if you're a teen if you're a kid

You know you go through that sort of pre teenage stage then you go through that teenage stage then you go through that you know

Leaving your parents house which could be college or could be whatever

But there's sort of three to five year chunks to define your life

Relationships a lot of times like getting married. There's a three to five year cycle

We can go through that time and time again in your career

It's the same thing you take a job

You're in a position for three to five years and you move on to another job

And so life is sort of split up into these chunks and

And one of the reasons people I think it's stuck and

Decide not to do the best work is because I think they're making a non-reversible life-long choice like if I do this thing

I have to make this one choice and then for the rest of my days. I'm gonna be doing that thing

You know that the grace about project world is when loser draw in three to five years

You're gonna be moving on to something else

Right, and you're not making that to sit that that life-long sort of decision and

What are you really focusing your time energy and attention on for this next three to five years?

As I was doing research for the book I stumbled upon a

Insight from Stuart Brand via Kevin Kelly via Tim Ferriss and one of

Is either tribe or mentors or tools of patents and Stuart's idea was any significant project takes at least five years to see through

Any real significant project takes five years to see through and of course I did what I do and I was like

Okay, so most of us live to be 85 is a reasonable

Conjecture when you look at life spans in the United States. So take your age

Subtract your age from 85 and divide by five

That's the amount of significant projects you have left in your life

Does what's on your schedule next week

Reflect what you would want to be on that list and if not how are you gonna make that change because if you don't make the change

What you're gonna look at is all of these years all of these projects that you didn't get to because you chose

To do something else in your life and I know especially in productivity and personal development. There's so much

Infosist on the choices we make a lot of times that are divorced from the actual context of our lives, right and I understand

That some of us have different degrees of privilege that allows us to choose in different ways, right?

If you're if you got more money you have a broader range of choices that you may be able to make than if you're a

Single mom is working two jobs to put food on the table and

What I would say in certain scenarios like that is that be honest about

Those priorities that you have right if your priority is to

Make sure your kids have a good life or that you do the best you can that is a project and so in my language a project is

Anything that requires time energy and attention

not just economic work

And the reason I talk about it that way is because after thousands of conversations with people

What they tend to think is that we have this mental switch that goes off and it's like a new day

equals

16 hours of open space of things to do and so I should be able to feel that with all this but every new day starts with

12 hours of routines and habits and stuff you got to do

Before you even like wake up. There's that much work to do

But because we have so cleanly made the division between economic work and life

We only tend to count the economic work and then we wonder why we're not getting things done nearly as much because that's actually a small percentage of our life

Right, we're not it's like you're not spending the time you say is really important with your family or you're not spending the time to

Exercise on a regular basis or create helpful food or develop relationships

Yeah, because those are the things where we just think well

I'll just get it done in the margins. Yeah, I'll just get it done in the margins and I was talking to somebody

I think Angela will be fine with me talking so I'll say it was Angela because it was in fact Angela where we were talking about

Her fitness goals and how she wanted to work out and I was like well, so now I'll pause here

Angela's also a coach. I'm a coach and when you have a partnership where you're both coaches

It can be quite precarious, right? I'm to have these conversations sometimes you're not wanting to be coached by your partner

But it was one of the plays not the probably

Substitute sometimes we're pretty much all pretty much all the time and so it's always a precarious conversation

And this is also my body of work, which makes it even worse, right?

So she's like, oh no, I know what's coming on this one and so she was talking about

Going to your classes and things like that and I was like so how are you scheduling and how are you doing that?

She's like well, you know, so look at my schedule and then I try to find a class that fits my schedule

And I was like honey like we on our small we on our own business

You could find the classes that work for you first and get those scheduled two three weeks in advance and then build your work around that

Right build your economic work around that and of course she knew it in a certain way

But it requires prioritizing herself in a certain way and so when you dig two or three levels under why we make sort of decisions like that

What I was really getting at and she knew was Angela

You need to see

Your worth and your value and you need to see that this particular goal that you have is more important

than the economic work that you're prioritizing

And until we are willing

To claim our importance and claim that things like that matter on the personal side what I'm quote personal side

We are going to default to

prioritizing actually

prioritizing economic work and

Then what happens in the moment in the year or over the course of a lifetime is that it's actually

This personal stuff that truly does matter to us

They get kicked into the someday maybe land and

Then we look back and you're like but I never went on those trips. I

Never ran the marathon. I

Never built a guitar. I never did the things because I never could justify it economically

I never did put it in my schedule and say I'm doing that and

I think when we start looking at everything as a project

There requires time-interesting attention and

Looking at the fact that what is fundamental to our thriving is often

Not economically relevant then we could say yes

Economic work is really important

And it's just a portion of my life. It is not my life all these other things are important

So yes, I am making this choice to make less money or to do less work there

Because this two weeks of spending time with my kid or my aging parent or

This new puppy or fixing my backyard or whatever it is is actually

Critical to living the good life

the part of the your ability to then

Make the decision but then actually make it happen is

also

Getting sometimes I guess I would call it brutally honest about

The band with that you actually have available to accomplish any of these things and

And my experience has been that I lie to myself about that and everyone who I've ever worked with

Lies to themselves about that as well

You your approach to you have a process which basically really helps you get very honest about it very quickly and

Then reorient the projects the personal projects the the career projects the all these different in in a way that

Actually reflects what you truly have available. It's this approach

You know like by framing it as as as deconstructed as analyzing like what are your available blocks?

Walk me through this concept of blocks because I found that just extraordinarily

Powerful and also eye opening when I actually you understood okay

So I have these four different types of blocks and when I start to map that out my life. I was like wow

This is this explains so much to me about why I'm not doing certain things and why I'm doing certain things and

What I might be able to rework in order to actually create a much more

satisfying overall balance. Yeah, thanks for that

So a few things about block planning first right one of the traps that we fall into is that we actually think that we have

Any sense of estimating time

I've had long something takes and we're terrible at it consistently terrible at it

So we can't tell the difference between something that's gonna take 75 minutes and 90 minutes, right?

But we make up a lot of stuff

and so we end up

just trying again

To treat ourselves like robots like we have that degree of consistency and we don't and

So once you let go of that idea and we go and sort of a block planning is much more intuitive

So there are four types of blocks that I encourage people to think through so one is a focus block

Which is that block of time where you do the highest level work that you can do whether that's creative work or whether that strategic work

It's usually solo time of just when you get what's ever inside out of you and those blocks are 90 to 120 minutes long

Right and why that long because that's about the time that it takes you to really dig in to getting something done

Do all the translation or do all the transitions do that thing and

And start to exit and it's about the time that matches

Our bio rhythms as well if we go through circadian rhythms about every two hours our body will recycle

Right, that's when you need to go to the bathroom

Because your body goes to these natural two-hour cycles. Yeah, after about two hours

I I realize I've just read that sentence

Third time

Still not entirely sure what it says. Yeah, and so it accounts for that and what I do need to say because sometimes people confuse it

No, that's not two hours of you sitting there typing

That's that entire block of time where you do all of the coffee getting and you do the bathroom

But you don't switch to another project or you switch you don't switch to another tool

Right, so those are your focus blocks and the second is your

Social blocks and these are the blocks of time that you are interacting with another human, right?

And so it could be a meeting if you're in a service profession

It could be that that's the time that you're working with clients and things like that

And those also tend to be about 90 minutes 220 even though or 90 to 120 minutes

Even though we like to tell ourselves it's going to be 60 minutes and we stack ourselves from meeting to meeting

So why is it 90 to 120 minutes because when you look at the amount of time that it takes you to really

transition into prep mentally and emotionally for a meeting and then to down cycle and

Then the reality is most of the time you will you meet with other people

Where there's work that needs to happen that it's generated from that whether you need send emails so and so forth, right?

And so we don't give ourselves nearly enough time for this

And then we end up in task debt because we we don't have a place for that in the schedule

Which leads me to admin blocks which are 30 to 30 minutes to an hour long

Where you do all the email and the phone calls and you just batch all of that stuff and get it done and you're in that mode

Right, I'm getting it done and then the last one is your recovery blocks and you know interesting on this one Jonathan

I I used to not talk about recovery blocks because it's on that self-care side

So recover blocks are what they sound like they're when you do the self-care or the are the bits that

You know are you treating yourself like you're human?

So there could be meditation it could be sleeping it could be eating it could be exercise

It could be whatever it is that helps you recharge and take care of yourself

And I didn't talk about them a lot except for a notice in my work

I have a time to write to down with clients and I'm one of those people that I

Don't really have a emotional difference between

Helping someone figure out what their schedule needs to look like

Versus figuring out what the business model of their you know or their team composition

It's all worked to me and it's all equally enjoyable

And so I would be looking at their calendar calendar and be like so where's lunch?

Like what and you look at you know six meetings stack back

But like where are you eating and like oh well, I just kind of fit it in

Except for I also remember the conversation that I had with them about them not eating lunch

It's like you're not actually fitting the sin right whereas exercise. Where is all of these things?

And so I made I became more adamant about people thinking about their recovery blocks and making sure that they're on their schedule

Because otherwise work or other things slide into those blocks and you just don't get it done

And it becomes one of those things but

Fundamentally what I want people to focus on when it comes to their best work projects

Or when it comes to like doing the work that they most want to do is let's focus blocks

Because we have far fewer of those

than most people think

And that is what drives your projects and if you don't have enough focus blocks

You're not going to get the momentum that you want and if you have none

What you're going to end up doing is committing to ideas

That don't have room on your schedule to do and so

There are just things to think about like what I will tell most people is if you can't find three focus blocks for a project every week

You won't actually make any momentum on that project

It'll continue to be one of those things that you're like oh, I'll do it next week or I do it next week or I do it next week

And you'll continue to punt it and it's not that

There's anything wrong with you. It's just there's not enough room in your schedule and you're trying to do you know

We learned about

Block planning in school if you had those little shapeshord sort of things where you like got to put the triangle and the triangle hole in the

Circle in the circle hole

But unfortunately what we do when we actually look at our work is we keep trying to cram

The square into the circle hole right we chief try keep trying to cram our focused time our focused work

Into the in-between of meetings and social media and emails

And we wonder why we're not getting to work because it really does take you know 90 minutes to two hours to dig into that

Make significant progress and exit from that and a lot of times I've noticed that because of the way people stack their days

They're not even allowing themselves the chance to get into doing their work because they know they don't have enough time

To get into it and get out of it. So what's the point might as well jump to Facebook?

You know you might as well, you know see whatever deals on Amazon that you didn't need today

But you're gonna find out anyways, right and so changing that into saying how do I reorient my schedule?

To put my focus blocks

During the times of my day where I'm most likely to be creative and

Focused and high energy makes a world of difference and you're we're just playing with time here

Right we're not we haven't changed the amount of available time

We just changed how we've used that time in ways that are better at getting you to where you must want to be

Yeah, so I mean it's a combination of one

owning the fact that

The focus blocks like the work that we need to do in those focus blocks is

Invariably going to take you're just going further and further further behind than beating yourself up and then becoming

You know just own the fact that this is gonna take way longer than I I think yes

Even I'm smart. I'm accomplished all the yada yada yada and still it's going to take more than I think it's gonna take

So let me set aside the time so that I actually feel like I can I can

Get real work that matters done the other thing I took from that is that if you can't find

At least three of those blocks

per week on a regular basis

To do that for for a project

Then it's probably a really good idea

To say no to it because the only thing that you're gonna be building into your your week in your life is

frustration rather than momentum

Absolutely, and here's where displacement comes back in right saying no to that new project

What you have to get real about is you are prioritizing something in your life already and so

Rather than saying no, I can't right because I don't have time the real true story is

No, I'm choosing not to do that project because I'm choosing to do these other things

And that can be a point of frustration for a lot of people right because they don't like that that's actually what's going on

But I think that is the wedge in your life

That allows you to start saying okay, I think if I want to do differently I need to choose differently

Right and the other thing that about focus blocks that are really important is it's 90 to 120 minutes

When we look at how much time we're watching TV when we look at how much time we're on

Distracting sites when we look at how much time we're shopping when we look at how much time we're doing things that are either wasteful

or

If we really had to counterpose those activities versus the work we're most called to do it's no brainer

Right to do the work so it's not like you have to go dramatically change your life

It's just you have to start stealing time from things that are either wasteful or

Don't nourish you as much and so this is you know

three fewer Netflix benches, right?

This is two less you know two times of you not going out to eat because that's really time intensive when you think about it

right

there are ways that you can steal back this time and

And you know whether we want to tell the John Grisham story where he wrote most of his novels two hours in the morning before he went to work

Like there are so many stories where we have stolen that time and

Put it to things or people who take a longer lunch breaks and work on their projects during their longer lunch breaks and you know

There are so many different ways to maneuver and

The other thing that I want to remind folks is that we'll really squander a day right?

We will really like a full day. That's what we hope for like I just want a full day or want a full week and then I'm going to do the thing

Except for when that full week happens

What I've seen across countless clients and countless conversations is one

That's when your body tries to claw back all the recovery that it hasn't been getting so you end up sleeping a lot and

Inventing out because it's like oh, I can do it now right I actually have space in my schedule

and the second thing that will happen is

That you will start thinking okay. How am I going to spend this whole day

Working on something and you'll burn your body out instead of saying I need a whole day

I would want you to be thinking okay. What are the three focus blocks for the day?

What are the three

Significant chunks of a project that you can do in three and in those three as and be super clear about what that needs to be

So that you don't get to end at the end of that full day and you're like I just been clicking all day like I'm no further along

Which creates the story in this head trash in this pattern to where you start resenting doing that because you look at every time

You've done that in the past and you've either slept the whole day or you've clicked the whole day and you haven't gotten what you wanted out of it

And that makes a lot of sense and I have experienced that personally as I'm sure a lot of people have

The other thing that I think it it makes sense that for us to touch on sort of like a wall or sort of in this zone

Is the idea of time of day? I have for two reasons right one. I have found that my brain works in different ways at different times of the day

You know if you ask me to be hyper creative and hyper productive, you know like at four o'clock

It's gonna be a completely different experience than if you asked me to do it early in the morning or even late at night

And so when you think about not just how many of these

Four different blocks do I have in my life realistically and then how many of the focus blocks do I have available to get the stuff that really matters

Don the other thing I found super helpful. I know you're a big advocate for is

Understanding when in your day. Does it make sense?

Actually build these interest scheduled because it can make I have been so surprised it makes a profound difference

What time of day I actually do these?

Absolutely and and that experience is not unusual right there are roughly speaking three different chronotypes

That we all fall into and that's that early morning sometimes called larks

That is the you know night owl which we normally call people who have later sessions and then

There's this emus this third damn pink call some third birds

But I like calling them emus right that are people who are really on fire in the afternoon neither in the morning nor in the evening like the afternoon as their sweet spot and

And again unfortunately we we've live in this industrial

Reduction this society that makes that puts us on this like first shift nine to five schedule

And that's when you have to do all your work and even when we go solo we adopt that mindset right that nine to five is when you work

But really if you're a lark

The reality is about seven to maybe one o'clock is your peak zone

Right outside of that you're going to be doing lower level work you're going to be burned out you're going to be tired

So and so far then even if you get an evening session on top of that like working in the afternoon

She's not going to be your thing when we start talking about focus blocks and you just sort of invert that for every chronotype

it makes such a huge difference and

The reality is I want to be more stark about this if you try to do your deepest work in

In an off peak cycle

It's going to be a road of frustration because you're not going to do it or

You're going to do it and you're gonna wake up and look at what you've done and be really frustrated about how bad it is

And how much time you wasted in doing it right and so

Again using displacement as our friend here. It's really helpful to think if I don't I'm a morning person myself

Right if I don't do it in the morning. It's not going to happen

It is not going to happen

So choosing to do all the other things besides that in the morning means that I've also chosen not to do this thing

and

That choice or that sort of recognition is really powerful when it comes to

How we focus and how we set ourselves up first of the first success and

Again, I want people to really be thinking yes

You can talk about taking every day and you know if you're a morning person doing it from 7 to 2 and doing all that

Yes, that's one way you can do it

But I also want to say like maybe it's just Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the morning that you still a one block

Every one of us like the world

Can live without you for two hours. I promise you right?

The world can just do whatever it's going to do for that amount of time for you to focus on your work and what matters to you

And

That's where we start talking about boundaries

Because a lot of times we don't set the boundary that we need for that and so whether it's a scheduling app or whether it's whatever it is

We know we work better in the morning

And yet we still take morning meetings

Why right because your client needs a read because somebody needs it turns out time and time again

that

We have far more ability to choose our schedule even in a corporate environment

Right

Then we really assert and so we end up in these periods to where we're sitting in the meeting

right here in our peak zone

And know at a certain point that the work is not going to get done and yet we still try to take it home with us and get it done

It just makes such a difference. I'm so hard that it's

If people were to do one thing I would say you know

Take the time to figure out when you're at your peak

I'm an experiment with putting some focus blocks in there and just stealing two hours at a time

Yeah, how would you recommend that people actually do that like what's the is there a simple process to

Figure out what time of day that zone is for you? Yes

So we have some tools on our website that they help helps people track this

But what I've learned is a really great tool

Our really great way of backing into it is think about how you would operate on a vacation when you've already rested

It tends to give you an idea of when you would naturally do different types of things right because you don't have the

External constraint of other people's schedules and other people's priorities right

So part of it can be

Momotory journaling where you look at every hour and say how do I feel on a scale of you know one to ten and my creative or am I not creative

Um would be another way that you can do it

What I've experienced with this one Jonathan is most people already know

Um, they really do know

And they haven't allowed themselves to

make their schedules

match

Their chronotype they keep trying to make their chronotype match their schedules and it doesn't work

Yeah, right

And then you end up being a person who either never finishes stuff or you're finishing all the stuff that doesn't matter

and then you start

And then you go into that cycle of then you know like I am the type of person who doesn't finish it and that

Labels you as an identity of that person and then

You the thing that also stood out to me from what you were just sharing is this idea of so many of us I think feel

Constrained we feel like we can't actually choose that in our work and in our lives because

You know, so I'm a parent and I know that

For you know like many years a certain time where where I am

Hyper generative and creative and productive would be a time where I actually want to be really present for my family

So I have I have made a choice

To give up a certain amount of that because one of the things that matters to me most in the world

Is being there the people that I love most dearly

But also it's it's actually what I realized over the years is it's more

Complex than that. It's more nuanced than that because when I do that

every day

I feel great about the fact that I'm showing up for my family

But then slowly over time what starts to build up is a certain recognition that I'm not coming close to doing my best work

professionally and there's a certain amount of

That flows through to my mode of being all day every day and then when I think I'm you know

I'm here and I'm present for my family

I'm actually a little bit frustrated and pissed off when I'm with my family because

I'm not actually doing the stuff that fills me up and nurses me on the contribution side of things and

What I think I'm doing in the name of being present for my family is actually not only hurting my ability to do my best work in the world

But it's also hurting my ability to be fully present and loving and open when and with my family

And I've realized over time that I really do have to do this balance where sometimes it actually makes sense for me to say you know what

One of the best things that I can do for my family is to actually take these two hours and

Go and do incredible work because then when I come back for the other button you know time that I'm with them

I'm gonna I'm gonna really be there. I'm gonna be in my my my state of mind my state of being will be very very different

And that's a much higher quality of time with them

But that's not an easy thing to come to

Yeah, I'm so glad

I'm so glad you put that out as the example and also that you were honest about their frustrate their frustration and resentment that comes with that right

Because I think there's not enough space especially for parents who are creative folks

To

Be in that tension, but you feel you feel shame

Only in that actually. Yeah, you know because you you're like I shouldn't feel that way. Yeah, so like um

I used to call it mom guilt

Right because I've noticed so many of my clients and students who are moms they have this huge sense of guilt

About claiming that boundary and going to the coffee shop per two hours, right and leaving leaving their kids behind

But more importantly than that guilt is the guilt they feel and the shame they feel about being frustrated and resentful

About that choice and what's not happening and the story that they start telling themselves is I'm not able to do

I'm not able to do my work because of my kids

Right, and so they start pushing

their

Challenges and struggles on their kids when they realize it's really about their choices

And so in that scenario, I agree with you 100% in the sense of

the simple

Choice is to be present all the be omnipresent right

The cost of that choice is that in the end you're never really present

Right and there is that sense of fulfillment completion

um satisfaction that happens when you carve away that two hours or you carve away that morning

Um and let's be frank if you got a teenager the mornings are a great time to steal anyways

Because it's not like they want to interact with you in the morning anyways, right

And then you come back in your hole in a way and you can be extraordinarily present

Extremely generous with your time extraordinarily focused

Because you don't have all the wheels turning in the back of your mind about like the way that you're gonna have to

Re-calibrate your schedule or your project or what choices you're gonna have to make because you didn't get it done and

You know how you feel about the fact that you didn't get it done and so

I think too many of us approach our relationships with our emotional

creative

mental and spiritual wells empty in the name of being present

But how are we showing up in those in those moments and is that the type of presence you would want to have

I would much rather have personally

I would much rather have an hour or 30 minutes of angeles

really

clear focused time

Where she feels like she's gotten everything that she's needed outside of our relationship

I don't know that 30 minutes of that

than four hours of

Sort of that quarter time where she's trying to do everything else and trying to be with me and trying to do

It's like no, no, no, like I can wait

Right go do your thing and come back and I try to be that way with with her and with my friends and in the sense of like if I'm not in that place

I'm gonna tell you like I'm really not in that place right now and I'd rather

unless it's a really

I'm a momentous occasion like someone graduating or someone leaving for and you just have that period of time

I'd rather us find times where we're aligned energetically

We're aligned in interests

And we're aligned and sort of our general life satisfaction that hang out and be truly truly present

Then to be projecting that frustration or that tension into the into the relationship because it's got to go somewhere

Yeah, and I think it's you know, it's the difference between

just being present and

bringing your

Most fully actualized aware and available self

To that moment of being present. It's not an easy thing to do

We all have complex lives. We all have people outside of quote work

You know who play various roles in our lives and who we want to be therefore and at the same time

When we are not doing work that in some way allows us to actualize that deeper part of ourselves

It flows through to everything else and that's why you know like when I think about the work that you've been doing when I think about this book start finishing

It's it's it's on the surface is about yes like here's a really cool methodology to start finishing the the work that you're doing in the world

But bigger picture

It's actually a methodology to allow you to do the work that matters most

Most effectively so that you can then spend the greatest amount of time

being present and engaged

In all of the parts of your life. It's not matter most to me. I guess it comes to starting kind of comfortable circle because in the beginning

I asked you like why this book you know like well, it's kind of part productivity book

But it's also kind of part you know like self-improvement book and I guess is that ripple effect?

I think so and I would want to say it in a bit more nuanced way

What I want people to really get into is the work of their lives

Right so that we see that there and and work is not a for letter work for me in the sense of it's something we want to get away from

We want to minimize so and so forth. It's this really sacred stuff that we get to do

Only a parent can parent their child in the way that they're going to do it

Right only certain people can be leaders in their communities in the way that they're going to do it

The only a particular creative is going to create in the way that she creates

Whatever that is. I want people to see that this

life work

Can be prioritized

I won't go as far as they should be prioritized because people have had their own priorities

But it can be prioritized and that for many people

That's where deep satisfaction deep flourishing comes from

And so yes, it's a book that will help you do your economic work

I'm just as exciting excited about the fact that it's a book that will help you do the work of your life and make sure

that

What you need to do to become the type of person that you most want to be is on your schedule

and is on your project deck and has the

Group of people around you supporting that goal just like what you would do any other economic work that matters to you right

Yeah

um

This feels a good place for us to come full circle as well. So hanging out in the studio today

Um in the context of this container of a good life project if I offer out the phrase to live a good life what comes up

Do what matters most

Right and I'm going to focus on the doing right. I won't say stop talking and start doing

But I will say like if you know that you've been doing a lot of talking and a lot of

A lot of ideating but you have him doing a lot of making or doing or leading or whatever your thing is

Um just understand that that gap between the good life you want to live

And where you are

Is probably bridged by certain types of doing

That you have to start doing

Hmm. Thank you. Thank you

Hey before you leave if you love this episode safe

That you will also love the conversation that we had with Brad Feld about focusing in on what really matters in life or what he calls

Picking or 2% and putting everything up against it. You'll find a link to Brad's episode in the show notes

This episode of Good Life project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me Jonathan Fields

Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez Chris to forecorder crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del for her research on this episode

And of course if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow Good Life project in your favorite listening app

And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable and chances are you did since you're still listening here

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Until next time I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life project

[Mastering the Art of Finishing: How to Bridge the Gap Between Ideas and Impact]-[How to Get Unstuck & Finish What Matters | Charlie Gilkey]

📋 Summary

Bridging the Gap: From Ideation to Impact

The Philosophy of 'Doing' and Why Productivity Fails

Strategic Execution: The 'Block' Framework

Embracing Displacement and Seasonal Cycles

Identity Shift: Becoming a Finisher

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript